The House of Discarded Dreams (11 page)

Vimbai studied him a while. There was no hurry for her to speak, and she hoped that her silence came across as unnerving rather than timid.

The catfish smirked a little, his whiskers hitching up to expose a wide lipless mouth. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

She spoke only when she felt certain that her voice would come out without trembling. “Who are you?” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” the fish replied in the same breathless voice. “As to who I am?” He paused, swallowing air in large gulps, his gill covers falling and rising like bellows. “I think you know that. Or have you lost touch with the stories you learned like you lost touch with your past?”

Vimbai smiled. A few months back these words would’ve stung. Today, she knew well enough that they were not the truth—at least, not the real truth. Sure, her Shona was lacking and her knowledge of her parents’ culture was patchy, to say the least. Yet, Vimbai refused to feel guilty for being the way she was. “I remember,” she said. “You’re the man-fish.”

“That’s right,” the catfish answered. “And what are you doing in my dream?”

It had not occurred to Vimbai that the house might not be their creation entirely; yet, she dismissed the thought that the catfish was the architect of this place. It seemed too influenced by human things—furniture everywhere, and very little water. Besides, dreams of dreams sounded awfully recursive to her. “It’s not your dream,” she said. “You’re lying.”

“Maybe not yet,” the man-fish answered. With a single beat of a strong blunt tail, he sent a spray of murky water splashing into Vimbai’s face. When she rubbed her eyes dry, he was gone—not even a trace on the surface of the lake, not even a tattoo of concentric circles as if after a fallen stone.

Back in the kitchen, Vimbai’s pensive mood was dispelled by Peb’s frantic cries. He hovered over the stove and wailed and whimpered, inconsolable, despite the
vadzimu
’s and Felix’s efforts. Peb cried and cried and fluttered frantically about, like a moth trapped under a lampshade.

“What’s the matter with him?” Vimbai asked. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the racket.

“Aaaaaaa!” Peb wailed in response, opening his mouth wide. Only then did Vimbai notice that his tongue was missing—his mouth was an empty cave bordered by two rows of transparent teeth, smooth and devoid of any features, like the inside of a teacup.

Vimbai turned to Felix, who was following Peb around the kitchen, his hands flapping helplessly. “Who did that to him?”

“No idea,” Felix said. “He just showed up like this.”

“Can you help him?”

Felix shook his head and stopped pacing. “No, of course not. How can I? There are forces, and I don’t understand them, and no one ever had a phantom tongue—at least the one I know of.”

Cat got your tongue?
Vimbai remembered the hissing voice of the man-fish. More like catfish got your tongue, she thought. Perhaps that was the original expression—cat getting someone’s tongue just didn’t make sense; then again, neither did catfish.

Vimbai’s throat constricted, and when a sob squeezed out of it, it startled her, as if it came from an extraneous source. She had surprised herself; she did not expect to feel such acute grief for the poor Peb and his stolen tongue. The Psychic Energy Baby, birthed in some ethereal realm, had grown to be a part of Vimbai with his festoons of feet and hands, with his relentless desire to absorb colors and parts of people. He became a part of the household, and without Vimbai’s ever noticing, they all had learned to love him—even Felix, as unhinged and disconnected as he was most of the time.

Vimbai could think of nothing better to do than to pick Peb up—he struggled in her arms at first and then quieted and felt silent save for an occasional sob. She held him awkwardly, having little experience with babies, psychic or otherwise. As Peb relaxed in her arms, Vimbai thought about what it would be like, to have a baby sibling.

The
vadzimu
touched her elbow, startling Vimbai from her thoughts. “Don’t cry, granddaughter.”

“But . . . but they took his
tongue
,” Vimbai said, and swiped her open palm over her watering eyes. “What will he do now?”

“You can always find what has been misplaced,” the ghost said. “You just need to know where to look. Now, who could’ve taken it?”

“The catfish,” Vimbai said. “The man-fish, I mean. Only I don’t know how—he was in his lake and I spoke to him.”

The
vadzimu
gasped. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” Vimbai said. “I wanted to see what he was up to, I guess. And just to make sure he wasn’t planning anything . . . I was worried about the crabs because of the dream I had.”

“You should be careful with the man-fish,” the ghost said. “He is cunning—more cunning than you can imagine.”

Felix stopped his pacing. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe he took Peb’s tongue so that Peb couldn’t tell us something.”

“Like what?” Vimbai asked, still sniffling. So small, so ethereal. So helpless. Impossible, and yet alive, and yet mutilated. The conglomeration of wrongness was so great that Vimbai felt like crying again.

“I don’t know,” Felix said. “But Peb, he floats everywhere. He babbles . . . babbled about all sorts of abstract stuff, but he notices things. Right, Peb?”

Peb nodded, his forehead brushing against Vimbai’s shoulder, light like sleeping breath of a real infant—or at least, that was how Vimbai imagined it.

She hugged Peb closer to her, and he felt like an air-filled balloon in her arms, smooth and light and real. “What have you seen?” she asked. “Who did this to you?”

Still sobbing, Peb pressed his face into her shoulder.

“Are you afraid to tell us?”

Another brush against her shoulder signified another nod.

“Don’t worry,” Vimbai said. “We’ll protect you. You tell us when you’re ready.”

Peb wailed a little.

“He can’t talk,” Felix said.

“I know. He can still point whoever did this out, or answer yes or no questions.”

The
vadzimu
patted Vimbai’s shoulder reassuringly. “When he’s ready,” she said. “When we all are ready.”

Vimbai fled to the small tropical grove that currently separated her and Felix’s rooms. She left Peb, still distraught but quiet, with her grandmother’s ghost, and sought solitude and time to think. She felt exposed and betrayed, as if a dream she was enjoying had taken a sudden and unwarranted turn toward nightmare. She wished Maya was here so that Vimbai could ask her what she thought now, now that Peb’s tongue had been stolen, about having their own domain and being wild queens of the dream realm she suspected was Africa of the spirit. What she thought now, when the man-fish was stalking them from its lake and paying no attention to all the great names for rivers and mountain ridges and furniture deposits they had come up with.

She wandered among the thick trunks, flared at the bases like trombones, covered in green ribbons of moss and twisting ropes of vines. She craned her neck to see interweaving branches hundreds of feet above her, right under the painted fiberboard sky. Orchids and bromeliads cascaded from the branches, and Vimbai squinted at the bright red and yellow flowers.

She grabbed onto an especially sturdy vine and yanked it a few times. The vine held, and Vimbai pulled herself up, her toes finding footholds in deep fissures in the bark. She had been a good tree climber when she was younger, and now the skills still remained. The whole thing about tree climbing was not being afraid to fall, and having faith that the next foothold or a branch would be there when one needed it; and Vimbai had this faith. As she climbed, the bark opened in accommodating cracks and the branches offered themselves to her reaching fingers, until she settled in the intersection of several sturdy branches that offered a perch and a canopy. Her back resting against the trunk and her gaze settling on the idyll of a basket fern housing a white and pink orchid among its feathery leaves, she felt alone and at peace; and most of all, she felt secure from the catfish, so far away in his lake.

Vimbai wished she could stay up in this tree forever, without ever having to go down and to deal with the man-fish or Peb’s missing tongue. She wished she could stay here until they safely touched ground in New Jersey, and there she would go home. Her mother must be worrying herself sick about her by now, and her father was probably quiet and reassuring at home, but at work he would spend his breaks phoning morgues and hospitals; he would pull favors with both Camden cops and Camden drug dealers, both of which he had been patching up for years now. He would look for information and come home late after stopping by every morgue and looking at every dead black girl between sixteen and thirty, each body a simultaneous stab in the heart and a sigh of guilty relief.

Vimbai regretted that she had been so focused on her mother and she on Vimbai that they both pushed her father to the sidelines, his relationship with them uncomplicated, reduced to the function of arbitrator and peacemaker. Her father who only lost his cool when either Mugabe or Rhodesia was mentioned. Her father with a secret political past that barred him from ever visiting home, and his vague and undefined fears Vimbai wished she asked about.

It struck her as profound, that she could see her parents’ grief with such clarity. It was not an eternal childish they’ll-be-sorry-when-I’m-dead mantra but rather her intimate knowledge of how they were, how they functioned in the world, their responses as predetermined and predictable to her as her own. Perhaps even more so. She wished she could go home now, to reassure them and to stay with them so they would never have to worry again.

She wondered about Maya then, about how she managed to survive in the world and to function without such supporting love, invisible and strong, even if it was far away and only imagined. No wonder she clung to her dogs.

As if answering her thoughts, short thin barks reached her from below, and she peered down between the branches. Ruddy backs and fluffy tail tips appeared in the greenery and disappeared again, hidden by the lush vegetation. And there was Maya, her unruly black hair and yellow t-shirt as unmistakable as her half-foxes half-possums.

“Maya,” Vimbai called.

Maya stopped and looked around, puzzled.

“Up here.” Vimbai waved with both arms when Maya looked up.

“What are you doing in this tree? Have you heard about Peb?”

“Thinking,” Vimbai answered. “Yes, I saw him. Terrible, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Maya yelled, craning her neck. “Felix thinks it’s the catfish in the lake. Did you see him?”

“Come up here, and I’ll tell you.”

Maya shook her head. “My dogs can’t climb, and they’ll go nuts if I leave them down here by themselves. You come down.”

Vimbai sighed but obeyed. Climbing down was always harder for her. On her way up, she could just keep her gaze on the sky above; coming down, she had to look at the ground, aware how far away it still was. When she finally stood next to Maya, panting, she smiled. “You have to climb with me one day. It’s really gorgeous up there. And the flowers!”

“Maybe,” Maya said. “What happened with the fish?”

Vimbai recounted her adventure and her conversation with the catfish. When she mentioned Balshazaar, Maya frowned. “You don’t think he could be mixed up in it, do you?”

“Why would he be?” Vimbai said.

Maya shrugged and looked around. “I don’t know. He just creeps me out, that’s all.”

“All he knows is Felix.”

“Precisely. Maybe he wanted to make some new friends, friends of his own.”

Vimbai looked around too, watching for the glistening of parchment skin in the underbrush. A shrunken dome hopping around on its single non-existing leg like it owned the place. “You’re a bit quick to jump to the conclusions.”

“Who else then?” Maya said. “Not Felix and not the ghost. Not you, not me. Who else is here?”

“The
wazimamoto
,” Vimbai said. “The men in medical trucks. In my dream, they were with the man-fish—in cahoots with him, I mean.”

“I haven’t seen any of them around,” Maya said.

“This place is huge,” Vimbai said, and felt a chill. “There could be anything hiding in here somewhere and we wouldn’t even know it.”

Maya seemed worried for a second. “If they came to Peb, they know where we all are.”

“Of course. There’s always someone in the kitchen. Or the living room, at least.”

“We need to find another place to hide out, in case of emergency,” Maya said. “I think I know one.”

“From your dreams?” Vimbai guessed.

Maya nodded. “Come along. I’ll show you my secret, and I’ll explain on the way.”

Vimbai followed Maya, and the dogs barked and bounded ahead, as if they knew the way very well.

Chapter 11

Vimbai was pleased to have earned enough of Maya’s trust for her to talk to Vimbai so openly; yet the story Maya told her left her worried and upset. It just didn’t seem either normal or fair, to seek refuge in one’s own nightmares. And Maya was a nightmare factory.

When Maya was younger, she used to live in Northern Jersey. Not in the projects as such, she said, but pretty damn close. In Newark there just aren’t too many what one would consider ‘good’ neighborhoods, and she learned early on what gunshots sounded like, and what ‘alley apple’ meant.

Still, it wasn’t all bad, she told Vimbai. As a teenager, Maya carried a switchblade, as a kind of bravado rather than against any real danger. The neighborhood she lived in, while not exactly wealthy, was not unsafe—there were flowerboxes on the windowsills, and geraniums bloomed in them. Late night in August, people sat on their porches, having long and slow conversations, waiting for the heat of the day to let up enough to allow sleep.

Up in her room, Maya used to listen to the drawl of voices outside, as she lay on top of her blue and yellow quilt, her forehead beading with sweat. She listened to the TV in the apartment downstairs, to the sounds of traffic on East Kinney Street. Through the window by her bed, the streetlamps looked like ghostly white globes through the haze rising off the heated pavement, only snatching glimpses of the peeling siding and the wide brick porch of the house across the street. She could not see the porch of her own house, but she knew that her grandmother was there, sitting on the steps with her feet in black shoes planted firmly on the sidewalk, her knitting in the wide hammock of her dress stretched taut between the knobby old knees.

It was too hot to sleep, and Maya tossed from side to side, willing the white curtains to flutter, to bring a breath of fresh wind, any movement of the sticky humid air. Only in retrospect did she realize how happy she had been back then. How sad it was when you left your happiest days behind when you were fourteen.

She was eager to reassure Vimbai that really, it wasn’t so bad—so many had it much worse, and Maya was lucky in many ways. She would not call it a hard life; it was just that shit happened with alarming frequency—to everyone, so why not her? She was not too special not to catch some shit every now and again.

Statistically speaking, being raised by one’s grandparents put one at a certain disadvantage—life expectancy was a bitch, as Maya’s grandmother was fond of saying. Well, maybe not in those very words, but the meaning was the same. This is why she made sure that Maya studied hard and did not slack off at school; this is why when she found the switchblade she chased her down the street, swinging a long leather belt she must’ve acquired for that very purpose—at least, she never wore trousers, and the belt clearly had no fashion-related application. Even if Maya wanted to grow up ghetto (and she had toyed with the idea), she never had a chance—not while her grandmother was alive, and not after she passed away. Even in death, she threatened Maya’s conscience with the leather belt, forever branded into her imagination.

Maya’s grandmother threatened to die so frequently that when she actually did, in December of Maya’s sixteenth year, Maya felt betrayed and puzzled—she hadn’t done anything wrong, and therefore did not warrant this most severe of all punishments, the kind that was supposed to exist only as a threat but never to be carried out. Especially not when Maya was doing so well in school, taking AP lit and biology, and acing her practice SAT tests.

So it was not surprising that Maya’s nightmares centered around the simple pine coffin, with a small old lady (and she was small, despite Maya’s early memories when her grandmother towered over her, gigantic like God) dressed in black shoes and black dress, a pillbox hat, and a pair of white gloves clutching her knitting needles—she was quite clear on requesting her outfit and her knitting in her last will she dictated to Maya just two weeks before her failing heart had finally given out.

Maya remembered the shining organ pipes in the church and the coffin, but not much else. Maybe this is why her dreams placed the coffin into the building she could never forget, no matter how much she tried.

It was a multistoried monstrosity just a few blocks to the north from Maya’s house, and the epicenter of the gunshots that reached their relatively peaceful enclave of the working poor. The building itself seemed the very cause of the violence and other improprieties—at least, this is what Maya’s grandmother said. “They stuff people into these egg cartons,” she would say, frowning, “and it’s so big that no one knows who their neighbors are, and they never have to look them in the face. So they break and steal and put their graffiti on the walls, because only God can see them, and he ain’t saying anything. And here, on this street, we know our neighbors, and this is why everyone behaves—shame keeps people decent.”

The city authorities were apparently of the same mind, and in their continuing quest for gentrification, they decided to demolish the projects and build a center with shops and coffee bars instead, where people would come to spend money rather than kill each other and sell drugs. Maya’s neighbors weren’t fond of the projects, but they were even less fond of shopping malls that were designed to drive housing prices even higher, and people who lived there away. Maya and a few of her friends visited the gutted building just before it was razed, to pay their ambivalent respects.

This was the building Maya dreamed about, twisted and distorted by time and sleeping mind, and enough time had passed that she would not be able to say how accurate the dream version was, or even if it bore any semblance to reality. She dreamed of the central staircase ensconced in concrete slabs, spiraling through the center of the hollow, empty building—just the outer walls remained, with all the internal constructions, floors, partitions and doors completely gone. Just a giant echoey brick of space, with a staircase boring through its empty heart, and when Maya looked up it seemed to go on forever.

There were no banisters remaining, and Maya and two other kids, Phil and Janet, climbed the staircase, scared that they would get dizzy on its endless turns and plummet all the way down to the naked foundation, with nothing there to break their fall. And in her dreams, Maya still climbed this staircase, all the way to the top. It ended in a simple wooden platform that held a coffin with a small old lady inside, her gloves and hat and knitting needles just like Maya remembered them—the dead heart of a gutted monster building, useless and unbearably sad.

The monstrous high-rise stood on a sharp cliff that jutted out of a seemingly endless sea of old shoes and handbags. Vimbai decided not to contemplate the origin of them, but rather concentrate on the cliff itself. It appeared to be made of the same material as the climbing wall in the college gym, and Vimbai felt an acute pang of nostalgia for her classes and the campus and a sky that was not just painted on the ceiling.

There was a path leading to the top, steep but passable, and the dogs bounded ahead—they knew the way.

“Weird,” Vimbai said. “You have this place, and I have a Harare. It’s like each of us gets our own little fiefdom.”

“Or a queendom,” Maya said.

“The point is, who decides? Who gives us those things?”

“The house,” Maya said. “Our dreams. I don’t know; does it matter?”

“We keep saying that it doesn’t,” Vimbai said. “But we’re just saying that because we cannot find out, and it is terrible, living in a place you don’t understand. It has some laws we don’t know, and there’s someone . . . some
thing
that makes everything happen. Doesn’t it bother you?”

“A little,” Maya admitted. “Maybe it’s like one of those stories they tell children, like a morality tale. About kids who ask too many questions, or look when they’re not supposed to, and lose everything.”

Vimbai thought back to her spying on the horseshoe crabs—involuntary, drowning, and yet she broke an explicit agreement and felt guilty. “I know what you mean,” she said. “How much farther?”

The path had been turning and twisting, and Vimbai could not see the house on top of the cliff, only the rough rock face ahead, with the path growing precipitous enough for them to start using their hands. The rock offered convenient handholds, like the ones on the rock wall at the gym, made of metal and plastic. Like everything here, it seemed to hide artifice under the surface appearance of natural things, as if the house tried to disguise itself as a forest or a rock, and still its studs and dry walls and paint showed through the camouflage. She wondered if it was more successful pretending to be a different house.

The apartment building appeared before them as soon as they rounded the side of the hill, as if it decided to meet them halfway—Vimbai was quite certain that they were not yet at the top, and this was not where the building was first visible.

Maya shrugged as Vimbai’s puzzled look met hers. “It does that. I never know where it’s going to pop up.”

Inside was just like Maya had described—an empty shell of a building, so hollow that it was a miracle it did not collapse on itself, supported by nothing but four walls. The staircase, the concrete and iron rods and the steps winding round and round and up, was the only structure inside, and it made the building look even more vulnerable, as if they caught it in a second before the whole thing imploded; the second stretched, liable to end at any time, giving the place an air of simultaneous stillness and the impending catastrophic movement, inevitable tumbling down in a cloud of dust and grime and cement slabs.

Maya motioned for Vimbai to follow her, and the two of them ascended the staircase. Vimbai lost track of the floors signified only by turns of the staircase, and she lost all sense of direction, winding and winding around. The empty windows offered no other sights but the blind brick wall on all sides, as if the building was enclosed in another, larger one; Vimbai supposed that it was technically true, but it did not lessen the fear that was rising in her stomach. Round and round they went, as if trapped on some awful merry-go-round. “I don’t like it here,” Vimbai whispered, addressing herself more than anyone else.

Maya continued her ascent just ahead of Vimbai, her buttocks moving energetically under the jean fabric of her cutoffs. “Neither do I.”

“Then maybe we should go back.”

“Not yet,” Maya said. “Soon. I have to show you something first.”

Vimbai’s words flooded her mouth yet refused to leave it—but how? She wanted to ask. Is she still here, your dead grandmother, not even a proper ghost but an apparition of her dead body, lifeless? What cruelty was this, when even our dreams and wish fulfillments offered not comfort but relived heartbreak? It seemed shockingly unfair.

They arrived at the top, to the small wooden platform mounted on top of the staircase like a crow’s nest. And there was a coffin and garlands of flowers, wreaths and condolences written on ribbons; there was a small dead woman in a coffin, her small face pruned, her black shoes polished to a mirror shine. But worse, so much worse were the traces of life around her—there was a tent built of blankets and couch cushions, a pillow fort children build when they are trapped indoors for too long, some mysterious squiggle in their genes commanding them to convert every blanket and pillow into a den, regressing to the early days of the species’ existence. The dogs were there too, stretched comfortably as if they were home—they were home, Vimbai realized with a trickle of cold sweat between her shoulder blades. There were soda cans and candy wrappers, a small pile of clothes, a book, a flashlight. Maya had moved here from her room, this is where she spent every night and most of her days, climbing here away from Vimbai and Felix, to be next to a small woman in a small coffin, to sleep under the funereal wreaths.

“Oh Maya,” Vimbai whispered with dry lips. Oh, to be so alone—Vimbai could hardly imagine such a thing, such a separation between self and the world that a pack of mutant foxes and a dead body would be desirable company. And it hurt a little, too—she had to admit, to herself if not out loud—that Maya would prefer this to her bedroom, to the kitchen and to Vimbai and Felix and the poor tongueless Peb.

“It’s not that bad,” Maya said, answering not so much Vimbai’s thoughts, which remained unspoken, but her expression. “It’s cozy, even.”

“But . . . ” Vimbai fell silent, unsure how to say what nagged her. The fact that Maya’s grandmother was dead, that she couldn’t dream her alive, would sound too much like an accusation. “Do you think it’s healthy for you?”

“Why not?” Maya shrugged and sat down, her back defiantly propped against the coffin wall. “And even if it’s not, so what? I don’t owe it to anyone to do only what’s healthy for me. Not even to myself.”

Vimbai could not argue with that, and she sat down next to Maya. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to tell you what to do. Do you really think we can hide out here?” She almost kicked herself—her words sounded condescending even to her.

But if Maya noticed, she did not let it show. “Sure,” she said. “As good place as any. And no fish or medical truck could get up here—see, safe.”